This invention relates, in general, to application provisioning, and in particular, to facilitating creation of application provisioning models used to provision applications.
Application provisioning is the process of retrieving assets (e.g., components) of an application from a staging location (e.g., a developer's workspace or an application asset provisioning repository) and placing them in a location where the application can be executed (i.e., one or more computing nodes).
Currently, provisioning systems presume the existence of an application provisioning model to be used for software provisioning workflows. The systems use a model of the application and other dependent assets to prepare for an action concerning the application (e.g., to provision it, to run it, to uninstall it and its dependencies, etc.). The model and other dependent assets describe the application in terms of its software components (e.g., data and binary files, source code, etc.) and the actions to be performed on the computing nodes.
The application provisioning models that are currently used by the provisioning systems are created manually. A user specifically indicates which dependencies are to be included in a model.